About Free Culture

Lawrence Lessig could be called a cultural environmentalist. One of
America’s most original and influential public intellectuals, his
focus is the social dimension of creativity: how creative work builds
on the past and how society encourages or inhibits that building with
laws and technologies. In his two previous books, CODE and THE
FUTURE OF IDEAS, Lessig concentrated on the destruction of much of
the original promise of the Internet. Now, in FREE CULTURE, he widens
his focus to consider the diminishment of the larger public domain of
ideas. In this powerful wake-up call he shows how short-sighted interests
blind to the long-term damage they’re inflicting are poisoning
the ecosystem that fosters innovation.

All creative works—books, movies, records, software, and so on—are
a compromise between what can be imagined and what is possible—technologically
and legally. For more than two hundred years, laws in America have
sought a balance between rewarding creativity and allowing the borrowing
from which new creativity springs. The original term of copyright set by the First Congress in 1790 was 14 years, renewable once. Now it is closer
to two hundred. Thomas Jefferson considered protecting the public against
overly long monopolies on creative works an essential government role. What
did he know that we’ve forgotten?

Lawrence Lessig shows us that while new technologies always lead to
new laws, never before have the big cultural monopolists used the fear
created by new technologies, specifically the Internet, to shrink the
public domain of ideas, even as the same corporations use the same technologies
to control more and more what we can and can’t do with culture.
As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable,
even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups.
What’s at stake is our freedom—freedom to create, freedom
to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.